Peace,
But this whole concept of a reduction of morality (as far as sex is involved) is logically false in my opinion. I can't exactly remember which species it was, but there are other animals who commit this act for the pure pleasure of it. We humans are also known to have sex for the pleasure of it. The reason we perceive that this act is immoral is because we are brought up with this topic as taboo. What is wrong with it??
You are asking a very good question.
To answer it, you first have to understand what would be natural sexual behaviors of human being, assuming no social regulation like ?fornication is a sin?.
The natural outcome of it would be the law of the jungle no monogamy anymore, infidelity, no more solidarity between people, society of consumption of wealth signals, violence, and so on?
The good news is that human beings are designed to fall in love. The bad news is that they aren't designed to stay there. According to evolutionary psychology, it is "natural" for both men and women at some times, under some circumstances ? to commit adultery or to sour on a mate, to suddenly find a spouse unattractive, irritating, wholly unreasonable. (It may even be natural to become irritating and wholly unreasonable, and thus hasten the departure of a mate you've soured on.) It is similarly natural to find some attractive colleague superior on all counts to the sorry wreck of a spouse you're saddled with. When we see a couple celebrate a golden anniversary, an apt reaction is the famous remark about a dog walking on two legs the point is not that the feat was done well but that it was done at all.
This logic goes far beyond such obviously Darwinian feelings as hunger and lust. According to evolutionary psychologists, our everyday, earlier shifting attitudes toward a mate or prospective mate trust, suspicion, rhapsody, revulsion, warmth, iciness, etc., are the handiwork of natural selection that remain with us today because in the past they led to behaviours that helped spread genes.
There are vanishingly few anthropological examples of systematic female polygamy, or polyandry - women monopolizing sexual access to more than one man at once. So, while both sexes are prone under the right circumstances to infidelity, men seem much more deeply inclined to actually acquire a second or third mate ? to keep a harem as it were.
They are also more inclined toward the casual fling.
Men are less finicky about sex partners ? prostitution ? sex with someone you don't know and don't care to know is a service sought overwhelmingly by males the world round. And almost all pornography that relies sheerly on
WHY DO WOMEN 'CHEAT'?
Even then the female capacity for promiscuity remained puzzling. For women, more sex doesn't mean more offspring. Shouldn't they focus on quality rather than quantity ? look for a robust, clever mate whose genes may bode well for the offspring's robustness and cleverness? There's ample evidence that women are drawn to such traits, but in our species genes are not all a male has to offer. Unlike our nearest ape relatives, we are a species of "high male parental investment." In every known hunter-gatherer culture, marriage is the norm ? not necessarily monogamous marriage, and not always lasting marriage, but marriage of some sort; and via this institution, fathers help provide for their children.
In our species, then, a female's genetic legacy is best amplified by a mate with two things good genes and much to invest. But what if she can't find one man who has both? One solution would be to trick a devoted, generous and perhaps wealthy but not especially brawny or brainy mate into raising the offspring of another male. The woman need not be aware of this strategy, but at some level, conscious or unconscious, deft timing is in order. One study found that women who cheat on mates tend to do so around ovulation, when they are most likely to get pregnant.
For that matter. cheating during the infertile part of the monthly cycle might have its own logic, as a way (unconsciously) to turn the paramour into a dupe; the woman extracts goods or services from him in exchange for his fruitless conquest. Of course the flowers he buys may not help her genes, but in the ancestral environment, less frivolous gifts ? notably food would have. Nisa, a woman in a !Kung San hunter-gatherer village, told an anthropologist that "when you have lovers, one brings you something and another brings you something else. One comes at night with meat, another with money, another with beads. Your husband also does things and gives them to you."
Multiple lovers have other uses too. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hardy has theorized that women copulate with more than one man to leave several men under the impression that they might be the father of particular offspring. Then, presumably, they will treat the offspring kindly. Her theory was inspired by langur monkeys. Male langurs sometimes kill infants sired by others as a kind of sexual icebreaker, a prelude to pairing up with the (former) mother. What better way to return her to ovulation ? by putting an emphatic end to her breast-feeding ? and focus her energies on the offspring to come?
Meanwhile, male parental investment also makes the man's naturally polygynous bent inimical to his wife's reproductive interests. His quest for a new wife could lead him to withdraw, or at least dilute, investment in his first wife's children. This reallocation of resources may on balance help his genes ? but certainly not hers.
If Symons is right, the question of what makes a man feel the restlessness that leads to divorce can be rephrased what circumstances in the ancestral environment would permit the acquisition of a second wife? Answer possessing markedly more resources, power or social status than the average person.
Thus it is natural that a rising corporate star, upon getting a big promotion, should feel a strong attraction to women other than his wife. Testosterone ? which expands a male's sexual appetite, has been shown to rise in non-human primates following social triumphs, and there is evidence that it does so in human males too. Certainly the world is full of triumphant men who conform to this model. The most sucessful leader of all time ? Julius Caesar is an excellent example. It was said that the Roman Colosseums could have been filled with the wives with which he had sexual relations ? but there are lots of examples thousands of women ready and willing to sign on as contestants for Who wants to marry a Millionaire, the countless wealthy celebrity types (such as Johnny Carson and Donald Trump) who traded in aging wives for younger, more fertile models. The "multi-wived" tycoon J. Paul Getty once said, "A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you are a business failure."
Evolutionary psychologists have shown that the tendency of women to place even greater emphasis than men on a mate's financial prospects remains strong regardless of the income or expected income of the women in question.
The upshot of this is that economic inequality is monogamy's worst enemy. Affluent men are inclined to leave their aging wives, and young women ? including some wives of less affluent men are inclined to offer themselves as replacements.
Not only does male social inequality favor divorce. Divorce can also reinforce male social inequality; it is a tool of class exploitation. Consider U.S. TV talk-show host Johnny Carson. Like many high status males, he spent his career dominating the reproductive years of a series of women. Somewhere out there is a man who wanted a family and a pretty wife and, if it hadn't been for Carson, would have married one of these women. And if this man has managed to find another woman, she was similarly snatched from the clutches of some other man. And so on ? a domino effect a scarcity of fertile females trickles down the social scale.
As theoretical as this sounds, it cannot help happening. There are only about 25 years of fertility per woman. When some men dominate more than 25 years' worth, some man somewhere must do with less. And when, in addition to all the serial husbands, you count the men who live with a woman for five years before deciding not to marry her, and then do it again (perhaps finally at 35 marrying a 25-year-old), the net effect is not trivial. As some Darwinians have put it, serial monogamy is tantamount to polygyny. Like polygyny, it lets powerful men grab extra sexual resources, leaving less fortunate men without mates or at least without mates young enough to bear children. Thus rampant divorce not only ends the marriages of some men but also prevents the marriage of others. In 1960, when the divorce rate was around 25% in the U.S., the portion of the never married population age 40 or older was about the same for men and women. By 1990, with the divorce rate running at 50%, the portion for men was larger by 20% than for women. Since 1973 the gap between the rich and poor has increased by a ratio of 314 to 1 ? based on employment income. The middle class has decreased from 60% to 44% of the total population. The richest 10% earned $136,737 in 1996 ? about one generation earlier, back in 1973, the poorest 10% earned about 1/21 of what the richest ten percent earned.
The danger is that people will take the opposite tack react to this new understanding and insight by surrendering to "natural" impulses, as if what's "in our genes" were beyond reach of self-control. They may even conveniently assume that what is "natural" is always good. Earlier in the twentieth century natural selection was thought of almost as a benign deity, constantly "improving" our species ? moving us forward for the greater good. This mindset continues today in the unrivaled homage paid to economic competition and likewise through the philosophy of survival of the fittest being applied in business, industry and political systems. But evolutionary psychology rests on a quite different world view recognition that natural selection does not work toward overall social welfare, that much of human nature boils down to ruthless genetic self-interest and that people are naturally oblivious to their ruthlessness.
In this sense, yes, we are moral. We have at least the technical capacity to lead an examined life self-awareness, memory, foresight and judgment. Still, subjecting ourselves to moral scrutiny and adjusting our behavior accordingly is hardly a reflex, and not even fashionable in many quarters. We are potentially moral animals ? which is more than any other animal can say ? but we are not naturally moral animals. Perhaps the first step to being moral is to realize how thoroughly we aren't.
http//www.igs.net/~rogersk/mono.htm
A book everyone should read
http//www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996
Peace
